6 ms·

I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whir

I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.

wollsmoth 4y ago
burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  And the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning ROM."
  - ljf 4y ago
    I used Nero for years and 'got' the joke about Nero and Burning, but totally missed the ROM/Rome/German spelling of Rome. How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
  - dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
    I never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    I remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...
  - yazantapuz 4y ago
    22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name. Thanks HN.
  - sph 4y ago
    Nero was dope, then it started being bundled with CD and DVD drives and it became a monstrosity of useless features.
eek2121 4y ago
You can put a label on a USB drive. Amazon also has holders to sell you. Contemplating doing something like that for my Steam collection. Would also like an actual dedicated Windows USB stick.
mark_round 4y ago
I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators: http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/ http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/ There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s: "...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now. As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
- fatneckbeardz 4y ago
  and when people stopped telling stories around the fire, and instead people went to their rooms to read books... something was lost then too. and something gained.
dotancohen 4y ago
It's great to read that on HN. Every time I look at the HN background colour I think of the 1541 disk drive - I'm near certain its colour was either a conscious or unconscious influence.
stinos 4y ago
I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.
- asciimov 4y ago
  It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them. They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience. It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.
      - summm 4y ago
        That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.
laumars 4y ago
My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC. I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing. I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don’t work too.
- chaoticmass 4y ago
  I remember how my blood would run cold when you could hear the drive making that distinctive noise when it's re-reading the same sector over and over again because it's not reading right.
- Plasmoid 4y ago
  I remember buying boxes of floppies hoping that I'd get one that would be error free.
- asciimov 4y ago
  A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media. Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including factory stamped discs. Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Archivers of that time had an interesting dilemma. If you are compressing a bunch of files, it's more effective to concatenate them all first and then process the resulting bundle - like .tar.gz etc - since compression algorithms can then deduplicate across file boundaries. But if you do that, damage to any part of the archive corrupts the whole thing, which is especially likely when splitting it across multiple floppies. So DOS archivers generally defaulted to compressing files first and then bundling the result. RAR was an interesting case in that it let the user decide on a case by case basis between regular and "solid" (pre-bundled) archives.
awiesenhofer 4y ago
Agreed. I'd love a modern (ie. pcie card or usb) floppy controller so you could have a humble old 5,25" in your workstation just for fun...
mikehotel 4y ago
You might be interested in this floppy disk upgrade using sd cards. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU
- asciimov 4y ago
  That's neat!
snvzz 4y ago
I miss the tingle felt in the elbow when inserting a floppy in Amiga 500. Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say I miss it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moth-fuzz 4y ago
Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself - picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a generic universal bus port that could be used for literally anything else and has no specific semantic meaning to your PC's software.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  The “various shapes and sizes” is what offends my sensibilities about USB sticks. I kind of wish there was a single form factor for USB drives, purely for cosmetic reasons. Yes, I know that only the connector has to have a standard form, but it’s kind of ugly that every time I buy a USB stick, I’m subjected to the random wacky design taste of a random hardware company.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.
- throwanem 4y ago
  They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete. If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1] I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun. [1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though... edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details
downrightmike 4y ago
Could make one of these https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3f11cba67875e.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3...
jszymborski 4y ago
There's always the floppy thumbdrive https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive/ https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...
tapanjk 4y ago
> sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr ... and praying that there is no read error. That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.
dusted 4y ago
I do too :) I have game soundtracks in .midi format on floppies. I play them on my regular hifi amplifier using a Roland SB-55 + SC-88. It's fun to pop in a floppy and listen to music that way.. But it's double density floppies and they are indeed getting annoying to get my hands on.. and also to write to, but I keep a dedicated machine around for that.

wollsmoth 4y ago

burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.

Koshkin 4y ago
And the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning ROM."
- ljf 4y ago
  I used Nero for years and 'got' the joke about Nero and Burning, but totally missed the ROM/Rome/German spelling of Rome. How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
- dj_mc_merlin 4y ago
  I never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.
- akolbe 4y ago
  I remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...
- yazantapuz 4y ago
  22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name. Thanks HN.
- sph 4y ago
  Nero was dope, then it started being bundled with CD and DVD drives and it became a monstrosity of useless features.

eek2121 4y ago

You can put a label on a USB drive. Amazon also has holders to sell you. Contemplating doing something like that for my Steam collection. Would also like an actual dedicated Windows USB stick.

mark_round 4y ago

I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators: http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/ http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/ There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s: "...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now. As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."

fatneckbeardz 4y ago
and when people stopped telling stories around the fire, and instead people went to their rooms to read books... something was lost then too. and something gained.

dotancohen 4y ago

It's great to read that on HN. Every time I look at the HN background colour I think of the 1541 disk drive - I'm near certain its colour was either a conscious or unconscious influence.

stinos 4y ago

I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.

asciimov 4y ago
It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them. They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience. It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.
    - summm 4y ago
      That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.

laumars 4y ago

My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC. I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing. I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don’t work too.

chaoticmass 4y ago
I remember how my blood would run cold when you could hear the drive making that distinctive noise when it's re-reading the same sector over and over again because it's not reading right.
Plasmoid 4y ago
I remember buying boxes of floppies hoping that I'd get one that would be error free.
asciimov 4y ago
A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media. Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including factory stamped discs. Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.
int_19h 4y ago
Archivers of that time had an interesting dilemma. If you are compressing a bunch of files, it's more effective to concatenate them all first and then process the resulting bundle - like .tar.gz etc - since compression algorithms can then deduplicate across file boundaries. But if you do that, damage to any part of the archive corrupts the whole thing, which is especially likely when splitting it across multiple floppies. So DOS archivers generally defaulted to compressing files first and then bundling the result. RAR was an interesting case in that it let the user decide on a case by case basis between regular and "solid" (pre-bundled) archives.

awiesenhofer 4y ago

Agreed. I'd love a modern (ie. pcie card or usb) floppy controller so you could have a humble old 5,25" in your workstation just for fun...

mikehotel 4y ago

You might be interested in this floppy disk upgrade using sd cards. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU

asciimov 4y ago
That's neat!

snvzz 4y ago

I miss the tingle felt in the elbow when inserting a floppy in Amiga 500. Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say I miss it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

moth-fuzz 4y ago

Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself - picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a generic universal bus port that could be used for literally anything else and has no specific semantic meaning to your PC's software.

ryandrake 4y ago
The “various shapes and sizes” is what offends my sensibilities about USB sticks. I kind of wish there was a single form factor for USB drives, purely for cosmetic reasons. Yes, I know that only the connector has to have a standard form, but it’s kind of ugly that every time I buy a USB stick, I’m subjected to the random wacky design taste of a random hardware company.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

throwanem 4y ago
They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete. If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1] I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun. [1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though... edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details

downrightmike 4y ago

Could make one of these https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3f11cba67875e.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3...

jszymborski 4y ago

There's always the floppy thumbdrive https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive/ https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...

tapanjk 4y ago

> sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr ... and praying that there is no read error. That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.

dusted 4y ago

I do too :) I have game soundtracks in .midi format on floppies. I play them on my regular hifi amplifier using a Roland SB-55 + SC-88. It's fun to pop in a floppy and listen to music that way.. But it's double density floppies and they are indeed getting annoying to get my hands on.. and also to write to, but I keep a dedicated machine around for that.